Joseph Belbruno Blog

  The $19 Trillion Bond Question Confronting Central Banks August 19, 2026 at 7:00 PM GMT+10 The central bank liquidity hose. Photographer: David Sepeau/AFP via Getty Images Save Translate Takeaways  by Bloomberg AI We all care about the interest rates that central banks set, but what about the $19 trillion of bonds and other assets 1 held by the biggest among them? Those constitute a more esoteric, but equally consequential, element of monetary policy that’s lately transcended the wonky to become politically fractious. Supporters credit bond purchase programs with stimulating the economy in times of need by lowering longer-term borrowing costs and tamping down market disruptions. Opponents blame them for widening inequality, among other things. What becomes of these bonds is an issue of critical importance to governments, businesses and households because they influence the cost of money. And because detractors say they are a big reason why trust in central banks has tumbled....

  Why Scott Bessent Is Playing With the Treasury Market The simple explanation for all this is that the world is going into a new era of capital need, for data centers, the military and reshoring By U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Aaron Schwartz/AFP/Getty Images Scott Bessent got bang for his buck on Wednesday. The decision to double to $4 billion the size of buybacks of the longest-dated bonds led the 30-year Treasury yield to plunge 0.1 percentage point, a bigger move than any day in the past year, and lit up leveraged areas of the stock market. But Bessent is fiddling around the edges. Long-dated yields have been climbing amid a toxic mix of fiscal profligacy, a capital spending boom for the ages in artificial intelligence and geopolitical pressures. On Monday, the 30-year yield hit its highest since before the global financial crisis, despite Bessent’s previous efforts to keep yields down. The 10-year yield remains below the panicked near 5% it hit in late 2023, but th...

  The U.S. Helped Make Europe. Can It Break It? Cold War policymakers pushed for a unified Continent. Their MAGA successors are trying to undo all that. August 10, 2026 In an era of rising anti-immigrant, blood-and-soil nationalism, it’s getting harder to imagine the United States protecting Europe and its social-liberal values. It might be time for Europe to shake off some of its dependency, too. Illustration by Ricardo Tomás After the end of the Second World War, every major city in the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany had an Amerika Haus. People who might be lucky to have a roof over their heads gathered there to read American books and periodicals, watch American movies, listen to lectures about America, tap their toes to jazz from America. This enterprise, funded at first by the U.S. Office of Military Government, and later by the U.S. Information Agency, was obviously meant to present America in a positive light to men and women who had been fed Nazi propaganda for more than a ...

Portuguese men o’ war plague beaches in Europe amid heatwave Financial Times UK 19 Aug 2026 KENZA BRYAN — LONDON Authorities along the Atlantic Ocean’s Bay of Biscay have warned in recent weeks that the species typically found in tropical waters has been appearing on European beaches that tourists and locals have used to cool down from heatwaves. Meanwhile, warnings for traditional species of jellyfish are in place along the Mediterranean coast. In northern France, an EDF nuclear reactor was still offline yesterday after a “massive arrival” of jellyfish last week clogged cooling pumps. Sightings of unwelcome jellyfish in Europe this year have coincided with a historic marine heatwave and increased interest from researchers in the species’ ability to thrive in oceans warmed by climate change. Scientists who collaborated on the well-respected World Weather Attribution project said last week that high temperatures in European oceans would have been “virtually impossible” without global ...

THE US CONSTITUTION BETRAYED: JOHN ROBERTS' APOSTASY OF DEMOCRACY. D uring Roberts’s time in the Reagan Administration, a new conception of government was firing up young conservative warriors in the Justice Department.  It wasn’t just the President’s antipathy to the federal bureaucracy in general, and to independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board in particular. It was the notion that the power of the Presidency needed strengthening. In the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, this thinking went, Congress had gone too far in constraining the executive branch with presumptuous reforms that aimed to secure greater accountability and transparency from the White House. In a memoir, William French Smith, Reagan’s Attorney General, listed many changes he despised, including “the so-called Ethics in Government Act,” the legislative veto, the War Powers resolution, and “restrictions on the president’s appointment and removal powers.” Smit...